Simon Jenkins, in the London Times (12-31-04):

... My holiday reading has included the new sparkler from science writer Jared Diamond. After his ventures into zoology and anthropology, Diamond turns to ecological disaster in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He analyses the demise of the Maya, the Chaco, Easter Island, the Greenland Norse and, more recently, the warring Haitians and Rwandans.

In each case, short-sightedness led societies to exhaust their natural resources and indulge in reckless fighting over what was left. Archeologists can watch each society in turn make the same mistakes, usually by chopping down their trees. "What did the man think who cut down the last tree on Easter Island?" asks Diamond. The answer is probably: "Which idiot cut down the last but one?"

We ridicule these people for ignoring the long-term damage that they were doing to their environment -- and thus choosing to fail -- but so are we, and indulging in stupid wars into the bargain.

Diamond is clearly of the cataclysmic rather than equilibrium school of ecology. Doom beckons us. We face extinction from global warming and resource depletion. Soon there will be 10 people per square metre and only AIDS and tsunamis will keep the numbers at bay. Yet like most scientists, Diamond is at a loss when he turns from prediction to plausible prescription. We should go for sustainability, renewability, peace on earth and public transport, he says. But as for how to achieve these goals, that is a matter for politicians and "further reading".

I remain unconvinced that our treatment of the planet is terminally catastrophic. More to the point, the short-term warming of the atmosphere appears beyond our power to reverse. If it means a worse standard of living for many poor people, we had better spend our money on alleviating their suffering rather than on a futile effort to reverse the climate. The same goes for earthquakes.

On the other hand, we have it within our power to call to account the stupidity of rulers. Historian Barbara Tuchman remarked that of all the skills mastered by modern human beings, the least advanced is politics. In The March of Folly, from Troy to Vietnam, Tuchman noted the same phenomenon as does Diamond, that leaders repeat the same mistakes. They never learn from history. They are fixed on the short term. Even when they have chosen manifestly the wrong path, pride and idiocy prevents them turning back.

To me the greatest disaster of 2004 was not the Indonesian tsunami but the continuing conflict in Iraq, the bloody endgame of the September 11 disaster. The upper estimate of deaths in Iraq is 100,000, not much less than for the tsunami so far. While the one disaster rates as an act of God and the other an act of man, to wit the US President, to the hapless Iraqis the difference must seem notional. They must feel as impotent in the face of falling bombs and the continuing tidal wave of destruction. The bodies of their loved ones must seem just as dead.

The point of the blame culture is to make us wiser, to teach lessons. The lessons of 2004 should in theory leave us better prepared for the next earthquake or terrorist incident.

With each disaster, we should know better how to avoid Diamond's terrible warning against societies that "choose to fail". We should be better adjusted to the equilibrium of survival. I wonder....